Remembering Charles Billings

Synchronicity’s a bear sometimes. I’ve spent the last month clearing clutter from closets, drawers, and cabinets — disposing of all those things I thought I needed but didn’t, and finding special places to store the many trivial nothings that grew into meaningful somethings while I wasn’t watching. Among the things that turned up was a handwritten note from Waynoka Avenue that began, “Dear One ....”

Even if his name hadn’t been embossed in red at the top of the card I’d have known in those two words that this was a summons from Charles Billings — actor, vocalist extraordinaire, and the longtime voice of WKNO.

“Come have a drink with me at The Grove Grill soon,” it said, and I realized his phone number, scrawled at the bottom, wasn’t in my current contacts list. So I immediately logged it into my phone, thinking I’d surprise him with a call sometime soon. Charles and I hadn’t had a proper bull-session in a few years, and I’ve been trying to be better about staying in touch with old friends — particularly the people whom you sometimes just want to write or call out of the blue to say, “Dear one ....”

Days after unearthing his note from the bottom of my office filing cabinet, I received news that the great Charles Billings had passed away. I’m still processing …

Charles was such an integral part of Memphis’ cultural life for so long that there’s no good way to condense his accomplishments into a paragraph or two, so instead I’ll share my earliest, fondest memories of one of the most charming, gracious, and talented people I’ve ever known.

Whether he was acting in dramas by Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein musicals, or belting one out for Opera Memphis, Charles Billings, the longtime director of music at Farmington Presbyterian Church, made everything look effortless. Nothing impressed the younger, only recently urbanized, me half so much as the way he could sit down to the mic at WKNO, drop his deep, honeyed Southern drawl, and wrap his tongue around the names of all those classical composers.

Though generally dapper and dignified, I can’t think of the man without seeing him dressed in eighteenth-century military drag, wearing a sparkling rhinestone tiara, and a devilish, grinch-like smile bookended by a dangling pair of rhinestone ‘ear-bobs.’ It’s an imprinted memory from 1986, when we were both cast in a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Restoration comedy, The Rivals, at Rhodes College. These sparkly items, left over from some past show, were worn for our entertainment, and to let everybody know Prince Charles would be telling funny stories until it was time for his next scene.

It was my first Memphis show and my first opportunity to learn from professionals — like the man with the booming baritone voice wearing the tiara whose commitment to excellence combined with wild and wonderful offstage antics to teach a young aspiring actor some valuable lessons about fearlessness and freedom. Now, because I’ve never known how to write a proper obituary, let me share an off-color story.

The Rivals is most famous for introducing Mrs. Malaprop, the character from whom we get the expression “malapropism” — an accidental insertion of wrong, similar words into common phrases with humorous results. Backstage, between scenes, the cast made its own modern malaprops inspired by lines in Sheridan’s script. Mrs. Malaprop’s already bungled Shakespeare, “A station like Harry Mercury,” became “A station like Freddy Mercury,” while Charles’ line to a disobedient son, “Damn me if I ever call you Jack again,” was given a decidedly NC-17 twist. I’ll leave the actual change to the reader’s imagination, but suffice it to say, it was naughty, silly, made good use of the word Jack, and was all good fun until the night Charles, in the rarest of rare moments, became tongue-tied and very nearly said the adult “backstage-only” variation in front of an audience. Keeping a straight face was impossible.

“I’m gonna get all y’all,” he said, bursting into the green room beet red, and snickering like a schoolboy who’d just split his pants.

I mention the dirty joke to contrast with the other thing I so strongly associate with Charles Billings — his vocal interpretation of sacred music. He was the kind of singer literally able to shake rafters while inserting incredible nuance into every phrase. It was a powerful, revealing, and otherworldly voice that made it easy to imagine other, better worlds.

If I had only one sentence to summarize the man — very nearly a myth in local arts circles — I think I’d skip all the usual and well-deserved lines about gentility, elegance, generosity, etc. and go with something a little more hypostatic: Charles Billings was fully human and he was entirely divine. He’ll be missed. He already is.

Charles Billings passed away September 19th at the age of 62. Memorials may be sent to Calvary Episcopal Church or to Farmington Presbyterian Church.

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Chris Davis is the theater-arts editor of the Memphis Flyer, and a regular contributor to Memphis magazine. He covers the Memphis theater on a daily basis at his “Intermission Impossible” blog on memphisflyer.com.